Microsoft has finally got something right. After Vista and Windows 7 that failed to keep up with the buzz, Microsoft’s new search engine Bing is live!

After playing around with Bing, I felt that Bing is a bit more intelligent than Google. Though the search results are pretty much comparable, so much thought has been put into the presentation and navigation.

Besides the basic Search, Bing comes with some great features. Here are some cool stuffs worth trying out.

Will Bing Change the way you search?

Snippets From within Search Results

When you hover over any search result, a small bar with a bubble appears. Hover over the bubble to get a preview of the landing page and links to relevant pages on the site.

Hover over Search Results and Preview Results

Search Images Like never before

Bing image search is so intelligent that it can differentiate between a photograph and an illustration. The similar images link that pops up when you hover over any image brings you closely similar related images.

Bing Image Search Options

Similar Images in Bing

Track Celebrities with Bing xRank

Bing xRank is like Google Trends for Celebrities. Based on the queries from Bing users, the search engine will track popular people, and rank them. xRank is a one-stop info box about the person. News results, Image results, Video results are presented along with Biography, and other relevant links to digg more. Read more about xRank.

Bing xRank Results for Britney Spears

Watch Video Previews within Search Results

Search for a Video and watch previews of the videos from within the search results page by hovering over each video. For a video Zonker, Bing Video Search is gonna save a lot of time. Try it out.

Bing Video Search - Watch Videos Inline

Bing Webmaster Center – Submit your sitemap

Bing is definitely gonna catchup, all the optimizations we used to use for Google will now have to be done for Bing too. Start off early by submitting your site to Bing Webmaster Center.

Bing Webmaster Center

Bing Sounds Promising…

So far, Bing looks like a Google killer. Anyway, after a series of setbacks with crappy Windows Vista and a bunch of useless software’s, Microsoft must be glad with their new product. Finally, persistence pays off!

Did you like Bing? 🙂

Hello, I am Arun Basil Lal. Thank you for reading!

I am a freelance WordPress developer with over a decade of experience. I am passionate about making things and traveling the world.

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25 Comments.

Bing is cool Arun. You know what, it already brought nearly 400 visitors to my site which Live.com never did.
One question, the first pic in this post, how did you capture that screenshot when that mini snippet appeared on the right side? What plugin do you use in FF?

Yes I agree with all the new innovative ideas ,specially the way they show image search results,category arrangement for results,video preview . But have you noticed the number of results coming for the searches are low ,in some case very lower comparing to the giant Google. And the background wall paper image is a factor to make it slow in slower connection. As usual Microsoft Offers more functional but more hardware hunger solution. Google is the best for speed and accuracy !

I read the Bing documentation and they claim that the background images wouldn’t affect slow connections. The page is designed so that the search box loads first, and a user can start searching even if rest of things haven’t loaded. I think the images are loaded inline, so it doesn’t keep the browser waiting.

And of course there is an option to turn images off completely. Yea, Google is great, but Bing will be a great competition for them anyway. I already have visits from Bing, its catching up fast 🙂

These days many people have fast connections and when they have it, they would look for functionality rather than mere results..

I hadnt noticed the number of results, ya its really low. But I have never went past the 10th page, so anything more than the 100th result is a waste. IMHO 🙂

you are right ,the wall paper doesn’t consuming time of loading search box , but for an average user ,he will wait until it loads.

Still internet connections speed are not good in so many countries ,here in Malaysia I am using 3G wireless Internet ,which sucks many times. slower than dialup connection some times. From Work place and house I checked the Bing and found it is slower than google.

Lower results mean for some searches where google gives 10 pages ,bing gives 1 page. dont search turkey as they advertised . try to search some local company ,local product both in google and bing. hopefully bing will increase .

Lol, no one can copyright a design as such I think, anyway Google and Bing run on different algorithms, so they cannot be called copies. Ya some features look similar, maybe MS wanted to make sure that the Googlers feel comfy with Bing 🙂

Using the Xrank feature, I’ve come across some serious flaws. Take a look at the link results generated for Alan Jackson. Many of them refer to Michael Jackson or Peter Jackson or Alan Tonelson or who knows what. This is only one celebrity, trust me there are a lot more.

Is this how Microsoft determines celebrity ranking? How can you honestly think we can trust Microsoft’s ranking of celebrities? Or anything else for that matter.

[…] how you performed the search. Preview videos: Get a whole page of video thumbnails, then just hover over each to start it playing. Use their mobile site: The Bing mobile site is specially designed for mobile phone usage. Don’t […]